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found this reference from the guy: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5285410 should we update our betavoltaics report?

"Within a few years we will see the first true prototype of a spaceship that will take us between worlds," Worden said. this sounds to me a bit too much like Pete Worden :-) but I really like this one :-) One of those billionaires might be Google's Larry Page, who is keenly interested in space travel and NASA Ames's research. "Larry asked me a couple weeks ago how much it would cost to send people one way to Mars and I told him $10 billion, and his response was, 'Can you get it down to 1 or 2 billion?,'" Worden told the Long Now audience. "So now we're starting to get a little argument over the price."

sounds a bit optimistic to me but interesting ...

SPS rules ....

Unlike any other living thing on Earth, electric bacteria use energy in its purest form - naked electricity in the shape of electrons harvested from rocks and metals. We already knew about two types, Shewanella and Geobacter. Now, biologists are showing that they can entice many more out of rocks and marine mud by tempting them with a bit of electrical juice. Experiments growing bacteria on battery electrodes demonstrate that these novel, mind-boggling forms of life are essentially eating and excreting electricity.

Stacking laser printed supercapacitors (no clean room required btw) has lead to about 1100F/g and thus about 20-40Wh/L. For supercapacitors thats pretty damn good. For reference, Li-ion recently reached 650Wh/L. The gap is closing, although for supercaps of this type the theoretical maximum is 1400F/g.

is this the breaktrough that we were waiting for?

That depends on what application you are thinking of. For circuit board electronics this will allow integration of micro sized supercapacitors to provide operational power. They will have to be fed by external batteries still, but the close proximity allows for better tailored power demands. They also propose tapping into thermal/mechanical energy to charge the supercaps. In the end, they can provide significant specific power (W/kg) but you still need to upscale the production to cover large areas to also gain high specific energy (Wh/kg). This breakthough is for micro sized applications, not for replacement of large scale energy storage (electric vehicles, satellites) going up to kWh. That said, I know of several studies in supercaps at ESA, but they are still qualifying current relatively old commercial solutions.